Folks keep coming over to read this on a regular basis. They come here because they're searching for the answer to the question: "Can I use mustard oil to season a cricket bat". The answer is very simple. Please, do yourself a favour and don't even think about it. Your bat will thank…
Time to reblog an old(er) story. Since all my stories are (essentially) true, I have no qualms about recycling them every Thursday. I suspect some of my newer readers (Ha!) may have missed these gems and I cannot stand by and not bring some joy into their lives. Altruistic - that's the word.…
3 or 4 years later, <after this story> I was in Canada, far removed from cricket. A chance remark by a friend at dinner found me searching out a cricket club in Canada. Their first question "Do you keep wickets?" "No, I don't , but I bat a bit and bowl a bit."…
< This is a continuation of an earlier post written many, many months ago. Why has it taken so long to get to this one? Well, TheLastWord outranks me in the office and he was off writing about trips to Nepal and France. This gave no one else a word in edgeways. They say I wasn’t motivated enough. I talked about opportunities and the fact that the LastWord was taking so much room in my head and a couple of stormy meetings ensued. So, anyway, we then had the divorce and I came here to run my own blog devoted only to cricket.
Also, I’m not sure anyone is reading this. Anyway, it is here now.
EDIT: 2022. I’m back here because they wanted me back. They being the rest of the avatars with whom I share a mind, body and soul. >
Batting was about survival, because I knew only how to play off the front foot. It was in my final year in school that I finally found my name on the board. This was it. I was on the school cricket team. This is how it happened. (more…)
Given the spate of mini-reunions I went to last month and given it's Thursday, I think a reblog of this one and only formal school reunion I ever attended may be appropriate.
So I'm back from Kolkata or Calcutta, as it used to be and will ever be for some, like me. It was a crowded trip, with remembrance services, weddings, school and college reunions interspersed with sporadic maintenance shopping. ( I'll have to explain that some other day, that "maintenance" thing.) It was three…
The phone rang in the very early morning hours of Dec 17th, a Sunday. In the USA it was still Saturday, Dec 16th. I rose from the warm bed and padded out into the cold hall to the phone. I heard the pips that foretold a transatlantic call, waited for my oldest brother's…
It has been a long time. Yet, it seems just like just the other day the Slo-Man was young, slim and gormless instead of what he is today, middle-aged, fat and gormless. This is one of those momentous posts that are now given to the Slo-Man to write. For this marks an…
Introductory Passage Yes, I do realize that Normandy is not in Paris and so, technically and pedantically speaking, the Punjabi can't be in Paris if he is in Normandy. You are quite right. Wrong, too. For it is entirely possible that he was in Paris when he wrote the Normandy Notes. In actual…
The title doesn't quite have the same sort of cachet of 9 and 1/2 weeks, I'm afraid. Certainly there were no strawberries or Joe Cocker singing Randy Newman's "You can leave your hat on". <Digression #1: I used to work with a guy who really, really wanted high heels on... on her. Not him;…